Quote Originally Posted by TDB View Post
Worth a read http://www.foreignpolicy.com/article...rvene_in_syria
From the article:

And as painful as it is to watch, the wrenching reality of a brutal dictator killing his own people isn't a compelling enough reason to justify a unilateral, open-ended American military intervention to topple him.

...

But the notion that we should intercede quickly with some dramatic, ill-advised, poorly thought through idea of kill zones or safe havens without thinking through the consequences of what protecting those areas would entail is a prescription for disaster.

Intervening militarily now isn't about left or right, liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, or even about right or wrong -- it's really about choosing between being dumb or smart.
Which, I think, summarizes what many of us have been saying.

Quote Originally Posted by Fuchs View Post
Well, doom predictions about the impending outbreak of chaos always remind me of the tired Hollywood fiction that you need to keep people ignorant of an impending disaster in order to "avoid panic".

Let's face it; the assumption that chaos would break out (for any serious duration) is what result you get if you switch your brain first into sleep mode and then ask it for a prediction.

There's no real intellect, knowledge or originality required for such a conclusion. It's simple the arch-conservative basic instinct at work - the one that tells people that all deviation from the status quo is creepy.
I'm not sure I agree that the assumption that chaos will break out is silly. But I'm reasonably sure that if we do nothing, the current situation in Syria will resolve itself the way such things typically do: those in rebellion will be killed or cowed into submission, and everyday life will, over the course of a few years, revert to the status quo.

As I've written above, if the Syrian people want a different outcome, they're the ones who will have to achieve it. If the other Arab countries want a different outcome, they have the aircraft, tanks, artillery, guns, troops, etc. to try and bring it about. The only thing the intervention of the "Great Satan" can achieve is giving everyone a foreigner to focus their hate on.